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Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Dan Rather to this program. The legendary newsman, of course, anchored the 'CBS Evening News' for years until stepping down in 2005. But I suspect that he is most proud of his work in the field as a reporter over the years, reporting that helped define our country's attitudes toward the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and now, of course, the war in Iraq. On November 14, write that down, November 14, his new show, 'Dan Rather Reports,' premieres on HDNet. Mr. Rather, what an honor to meet you, sir.

Dan Rather: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Tavis: Glad to have you here. Glad to have you.

Rather: So glad to see you.

Tavis: Nice to see you. That was a - I'm out on a limb here, given what I've read about you and studied about you over the years, making an assumption that you're probably proudest of your work in the field. Am I right or wrong about that?

Rather: Right.

Tavis: Okay. What makes you so proud about that versus sitting behind the anchor desk all those years?

Rather: Well, because I dreamed. As a child, I dreamed. I've never been quite certain why I dreamed it, but my dream when I was, ever since I've been of memory age, was to be a reporter. Now, in my time and place, the time was the 1930s, the place was Texas. Being a reporter meant being a newspaper man. And I think it got into my blood, got into my very id, because both my father and mother were avid newspaper readers.

My father worked with his back and his hands all his life, and didn't finish high school, which was not all that unusual in that time and place. But I think because I saw them reading newspapers all the time, for whatever reason, I got it in my mind I wanted to be a reporter, and it never changed. And being mighty lucky, and even more mightily blessed to be able to make a living doing what I always dreamed of doing, I never dreamed of being on television.

Television didn't even exist, so far as I knew, when I was a kid. But I did dream of being a reporter, and I wanted to go to far-away places with strange sounding names, and be on the cutting edge of big stories. So because I dreamed that for a lifetime, I always enjoyed anchoring and things like election night and big special events and doing the 'Evening News.' It was always interesting work, and yes, it paid fairly well. (Laugh)

Tavis: Yeah, not bad work if you can get it.

Rather: No, no, very good. Not seasonal work, and all indoors, and all of that. (Laugh) But as a reporter, I'm a child of the road. And I'm out here now, working on an investigative story for 'Dan Rather Reports' on HDNet. But I've always enjoyed the field work. Also, that it's been a constant sort of graduate school. I learn so much. When I came to the civil rights movement, covering it for 'CBS News,' when I first came to work for the network in 1962, I had no idea.

I was dumb as a fence post about civil rights. I'd vaguely heard of Dr. Martin Luther King, heard some things about sit-ins. But it became my first major responsibility for 'CBS News' was to cover Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, just as it was beginning to really take traction. They'd been trying to get it to take traction for a long while.

And the education that was for me, if I hadn't been before, and you can argue that I already was, that I became addicted to field reporting. And once you get addicted, trust me, it's more addictive than crack cocaine.

Tavis: What did you learn from - here you are, a White kid out of Texas, and you're covering the civil rights era at a time when the country is trying to come to terms with what it means to live and to learn and to love these folk who look like me. What did you most learn, covering Black folk in the South then?

Rather: Well, the biggest thing I learned can best be summed up in the words of Martin Luther King himself. In his great 'I Have a Dream' speech, probably arguably, and I'd make the argument the greatest oration of the twentieth century, said, 'The time will come when we judge a person by their character, and not by the color of their skin.' And that's what I took out of that.

I grew up in a segregated society. Texas was segregated. I was born in Wharton, grew up in Houston. It was a segregated society. However, when I began covering the civil rights movement, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, I had never seen race hate to that extent. I was in shock and awe when one would go to, say, a Klan meeting. I never saw a Klan meeting till I got to Mississippi in 1962.

But the depth of race hatred, and the fact that it was not just below the surface, it was on the surface at that time - I know this will strike many people in the audience as sort of strange, because they're not of memory age, they weren't there at the time - but the savagery, the bestiality of Americans toward Americans, I've never gotten over it. I didn't come out of covering the civil rights movement the same person or the same professional that I was when I went into it.

Tavis: You mentioned earlier starting out with a love of reading the paper, a love for journalism in that regard. It makes me wonder what you make of the fact that if we are to read and believe what they're telling us, we have a generation now that doesn't regard newspapers in the way that your generation did. Does that scare you?

Rather: (unintelligible) very dangerous. That I understand the attraction of the Internet. I'm on the Internet a lot of times every day, and it generally speaking is the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is go quickly to the Internet, then do whatever exercise I wanna do, and then begin to read the paper. But I've argued for years that some self-professed intellectuals would say, 'Well, you can't watch television and be an intelligent person.'

Well, my view of that is you can't be an intelligent, well-informed person and not watch television. But you cannot be an intelligent, well-informed person and only watch television. And that's the way I feel about the Internet. And for anybody who doesn't read a newspaper, and yes, read a magazine from time to time, and even a better yes, read a book from time to time, cannot be, in my judgment, a truly intelligent and informed person, and cannot be a really valuable citizen.

Because let's face it, you know this, we've been taught it since before we went to school, and no later than seventh grade civics learned it. That our country, a idea that citizens will be informed, and each individual citizen will make his or her decision about where the country ought to be going, where the city or county or state should be Constitutional Republic based on the principles of freedom and democracy, is built around the core going, and then a consensus of the (unintelligible) forms around that, and that becomes our policies.

That becomes our government; that becomes us. Now, if people stop reading, and really reading, not just reading two paragraphs on the Internet, I think it eats away at the very core of this great country we call America.

Tavis: Tell me about this new show that you're working on at HDNet. Mr. Cuban, the company, yeah.

Rather: Well, HDNet is high quality high definition television. There's a lot being spoken these days about high definition television, because we're in a period which is similar, not identical, to that period when we move from having black and white television sets to having color television sets. It took a while for that to develop, but now who do you know that doesn't have a color television set?

And we're now moving, fairly soon, everybody's gonna have high definition television. But there are various qualities to high definition television, and Mark Cuban is a great believer in excellence and quality. So he started HDNet with the highest quality high definition television. And he and I are in partners, I'm not in partners with the business. Wish I were, because I think he's gonna make a lot of money. (Laugh)

He's gonna make a lot of money with it. But he asked me what I wanted to do, and I told him I'd like to do a weekly hour news program. And that I wanted to have total and complete, absolute editorial and creative control. And he said, "I'll do that for you." Now, talk is cheap. But he wrote it into the contract. And so this will be a weekly news program on Tuesday nights at 8:00 in the Eastern Time zone, and also it'll play at 8:00 on the West Coast.

A one hour program, we're going to try to specialize in three things. Hard-edged field reports, when big news breaks anywhere around the world, we want to at least think about jumping on it. Investigative stories. Investigative journalism has kind of gone out of fashion. It's more expensive, if you do it right, somebody's gonna raise hell about it. There'll be a controversy about it.

And then the third area is politics. So we hope to meld a program, beginning November 14 on Tuesday night around 'Dan Rather Reports' with this one hour weekly news program series. Now, in addition to that, I'm contracted with Mark Cuban and his partner, Todd Wagner, to do as many documentaries as I can do. But right now, my focus is on the weekly news program.

Tavis: You obviously still are as gifted and talented as ever, and your mind is as sharp as ever, and yet it raises the question for me, why you still wanna do this. I was saying to you before we came on the air here that I had the occasion a couple of years ago to meet your wife. And spent an evening with her at a dinner party. And we talked about her work and about her painting; she's a great painter. And you could be doing that or something else, and yet you're out here in L.A. chasing stories, still. Why you still doing this?

Rather: 'Cause I think it's my destiny. That I can't not do it. I used to say when I was younger, much younger, I used to say, 'Well, maybe I'm a workaholic.' But I learned that I'm not a workaholic. I have an off switch. I can hit that off switch. I love to fish, I love to be with my grandchildren, I love to be with (unintelligible) my wife of next year, 50 years' marriage.

I like to do all those things. But I burn with a heart-hard flame in the quest to do quality integrity field journalism. I hope and I believe my best stories are still ahead of me. So believing that, you say, 'Well, why am I doing this? Why I'm out in Los Angeles, I'll be down in Louisiana over the weekend, why am I doing it? It's because I really don't wanna do anything else.'

I can't do anything else. Martin Luther and his great stand said, 'This is where I stand. I can stand no other place.' Well, I'm not equating this with that, but in terms of what I want to do with my life, my professional life, this is where I stand. I can stand no other place.

Tavis: What do you make of this evening news race, now that you're out of the rat race? Ms. Couric is in your old seat. Mr. Williams. (unintelligible)

Rather: Well, I never considered it a rat race. I did the 'CBS Evening News' for 24 years. I was at 'CBS News' for a total of 44, and was a line reporter before I came to the evening news chair. But I was proud every day I did it. I felt privileged to do it. Things change, and the current management and ownership of 'CBS News' wanted to go in a different direction with the evening news.

And that's their prerogative and their privilege to do so. I haven't had a chance to see much of the, the new 'Evening News.' I've seen a little bit of it, but I've been traveling so much. And they are going in new directions, and we'll see how it turns out.

Tavis: I'll take that. 'Dan Rather Reports,' Tuesday nights, 8:00. HDNet. Nice to meet you.

Rather: Thank you.

Tavis: Glad to have you here.

Rather: Thank you.

Tavis: My pleasure. Up next on this program, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina. Stay with us.